WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition News

We've got a new public beta out on Steam and, along with the usual variety of bugfixes and minor improvements, it has three notable new things:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

1) In multiplayer games, you can now move between Yellowstone maps (currently Amethyst Mountain and Slough Creek) whenever you don't have pups, same as in single-player. Run to a section of border with the "To [Map Name]" label and you'll be asked if you want to move (using the procedures of either Host Decides or Majority Rules).

2) The devblog a few weeks ago talked about how, among real wolves, males are more likely to disperse to find a mate, while females are more likely to stay in their natal (family) pack. We have added this behavior to the game. So now, when looking for a mate, you'll find more males in the dispersal groups, and more females interested in courtship in rival packs. To make it easier to find a prospective mate, we've also added some visual clues: a red heart icon indicates courtable wolves on the compass (when they howl back) and on the Scent View panel.

3) For several years now, NPCs in the game (rival wolves, dispersal wolves, and grown-up pups) have sometimes had an "NPC Coat" -- a coat that is not available to players in Wolf Customization, so it's restricted to those NPCs. We've decided to open these up by making them unlockable. So now, if you raise a pup who has one of these coats, when you make them a playable adult wolf (in the Family Tree), the coat is unlocked so you can select it for your own wolves. This is not retroactive, so it will only occur in new games (in this beta and then the v1.1.1g patch release) that you start fresh. (Note that we have some cheat prevention code in there so you can't trade wolves with the coat. You must start a new game (or jump ahead to next year) and raise the pup on the same computer. After the Family Tree snapshot is generated and the coat is unlocked, it's then registered to your WolfQuest account – so it'll remain unlocked if you get a new computer. If you don't have a game account, it'll remain unlocked on that computer.)

See what else is new and improved in the beta notes here.

This public beta is available on Steam now for Mac and Windows.


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The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

In this beta, game saves ARE backward compatible with the last released patch, v1.1.1d. But multiplayer games are NOT backward-compatible, so you can only play with those who have this beta.

See bottom of this page for instructions on opting into the beta.

[h2]GENERAL[/h2]

[h3]NEW[/h3]
* Unlockable coats (formerly called NPC coats). Now when you raise a pup with one of these coats, that coat is unlocked in Wolf Customization after you generate the summertime Family Tree snapshot. (Only works in new games, not retroactive. There are some cheat-prevention methods in place so you can't share wolf saves with other players to let them unlock a coat.)

* Among real wolves, males are more likely to disperse to find a mate. Females are more likely to stay in their natal (family) pack. We have added this behavior to the game. So now, when looking for a mate, you'll find more males in the dispersal groups, and more females interested in courtship in rival packs. A red heart icon indicates courtable wolves on the compass (when they howl back) and on the Scent View panel.

* In multiplayer games, you can now move between Yellowstone maps (currently Amethyst Mountain and Slough Creek) whenever you don't have pups, same as in single-player. Run to a section of border with the "To [Map Name]" label and you'll be asked if you want to move (using the procedures of either Host Decides or Majority Rules).

[h3]CHANGES:[/h3]
* A few pup coats have changed a bit retroactively (to get better matches in the pup-to-adult coat sequence in the Saga).

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[h2]BETA 20[/h2]

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Water at top of Fairies Falls is pink.
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[h2]BETA 19[/h2]

[h3]IMPROVEMENTS:[/h3]
* Controller: Enabled auto-scroll when using controller to navigate in Known Wolves panel.

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Longer pack names are truncated on the World Map legend.
* Controller: Can't access Departed Wolves section on Known Wolves panel.
* Persistent Packs: Discrepancy in multiplayer with pack progression.
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[h2]BETA 18[/h2]

[h3]IMPROVEMENTS:[/h3]
* Controller: Improvements to controller navigation of Known Wolves panel.
* Persistent Packs: Added a delay before widowed pack leaders can find a new mate.

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Persistent Packs: Rival packs don't disband (or see other changes) if player has reached the end-date of the current quest.
* Persistent Packs: Unborn pups are not removed from rival pack if female breeder dies.
* Light rain audio is too quiet.
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[h2]BETA 17[/h2]

[h3]IMPROVEMENTS:[/h3]
* Increased odds of mortality for older wolves in rival packs. (Should also make packs a bit more likely to disband periodically.)

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Persistent Packs: Unborn pups not removed from rival pack when it disbands.
* Known Wolves: Some Departed Wolves lack a status.
* Known Wolves: Wolves duplicated and/or placed in wrong maps or sections after jumping to next year.
* Player-wolf hunger resets to 50% when moving to another map.
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[h2]BETA 16[/h2]

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Persistent Packs: Rival packs don't disband when the number of adults in the pack drops below two.
* Known Wolves: Sometimes wolves are listed twice, and under wrong map.
* Mate pathfinding issue near Lost River (DLC) ghost town den.
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[h2]BETA 15[/h2]

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Known Wolves: Yearlings can die when pack disbanding even if old enough to disperse,
* Sometimes long-dead wolves are removed from Departed Wolves list
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[h2]BETA 14[/h2]

[h3]IMPROVEMENTS:[/h3]
* Increased odds of Shadow unlockable coat, decreased odds of Frosty coat.

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* When moving to another map with a trial mate, trial period end automatically when arriving at the other map.
* New packs sometimes claim many hexes immediately upon moving onto a map.
* One Amethyst den appears on compass at all times.
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[h2]BETA 13[/h2]

[h3]
IMPROVEMENTS:[/h3]
* Improvements to 9F coat.

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Persistent Packs: pups and unborn wolves "dispersing" as siblings of adults when pack disbands.
* Slough Creek dirt den near Lake McBridge doesn't always render correctly in winter.
* Minor terrain issues.
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[h2]BETA 12[/h2]

[h3]
IMPROVEMENTS:[/h3]
* Adjusted odds of certain wolf coats higher or lower.

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* In Wolf Customization, wolves created from pups in the Family Tree cannot be edited at all.
* Typo in rival pack name.
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[h2]BETA 11[/h2]

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* In Wolf Customization, wolves created from pups in the Family Tree cannot be edited at all.
* Typo in rival pack name.
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[h2]BETA 11[/h2]

[h3]
IMPROVEMENTS:[/h3]
* Persistent Pack code was refactored to make it more robust, which should not have any changes except as noted here, but might create new bugs, please report if you see any!
* Yearlings are now called Yearlings until their second birthday -- but they can potentially disperse before that birthday. (Previously they changed to Subordinates at 18 months of age, to allow dispersing, due to a limitation in the code.)
* Reduced rival pack aggressiveness after player intrudes into their territory from 24 hour cooldown to 8 hours. (So you can return much sooner if you're trying to court a pack wolf.)
* Reduced odds of dispersal wolf finding another dispersal as mate (to reduce dispersal churn).
* Photo Mode now leaves wolf nametags enabled, but you can press N key to hide them.
* Multiplayer: If player goes AFK while in den, their wolf automatically exits the den so as not to prevent game progress.
* Multiplayer: Greatly reduced the number of dispersal wolves in non-Story games (since they aren't needed and can get annoying).
* Increased minimum number of dispersal wolves on each map at any given time.
* Controller: All Tab menu buttons remain visible now, with highlight the one selected, to help with navigating the tab buttons.
* Controller, switching tabs with shoulder buttons navigates to left/right from selected button.

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Female wolf doesn't look pregnant after going from Establish Territory to Find a Den quest.
* Player-wolf is invisible in scent view when switched to Carmella mode.
* Game stalls when in Reminisce mode and trying to jump ahead to next year (which should not be possible).
* Player-wolf can go beyond the map border when bite-holding prey, which can lead to a long forced-walk back into the map afterwards.
* Multiplayer: Pups repeatedly playbowing the wrong parent when they switch to an absent favourite parent.
* Multiplayer: On Known Wolves panel, dead pack wolves are not synced correctly.
* Lost River DLC: In wintertime, an invisible floor in coffeeshop is higher than the visible floor.
* Known Wolves: Unborn pups immediately grow into yearlings.
* File sync throws an error if manually triggered again while already in progress.
* Pup said to have starved to death when it was really killed (in rare situation).
* Controller: Physical keyboard doesn't work when renaming mate or pup.
* Dispersal wolves go into ranch area.
* Can get stuck underground after certain sequence of events and map-moving in Find Den quest.
* Error after a dispersal NPC group fought a territory NPC group and won.
* Error when loading saves from a short period of 2021.
* Added info about dispersal differences to Find a Mate: Tips text.
* Known Wolves: Dispersals can return to a natal pack that no longer exists.
* Error thrown when trying to delete many save games
* Pathfinding issues at several dens.
* Various terrain issues.

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[h3]TO GET THE BETA BUILD[/h3]
1) In the Steam app, go to your Library, then right-click on the WolfQuest: AE name in the left column and choose Properties.
2) Then go to the Betas tab and select the WQ current Beta option in the pulldown. No password is necessary. Steam should then start downloading it. Later you can switch back to the public version in that Betas tab, by selecting NONE in that pulldown.

We're making good progress with the Saga!*

Lately we've been working on the yearlings -- the pups who survived their first year of life and now are helping raise the new pups of the year (whenever they're not playing or getting distracted). Even at 13-15 months of age, they're still very puppyish, even though they're physically approaching adult-wolf size.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I know there are a lot of questions about yearlings, so let’s answer a few of them:

1) Once you've got some yearlings in your pack, how do you tell them what to do? The short answer is: you don't. Just as with your mate, you can go up to any of them and whine to invite them to hunt -- but they have minds, preferences, and personalities of their own. Typically, females are more likely to stay at the homesite and males are more likely to go hunting -- though certainly an individual can have a different preference. Packmates are more likely to stick with their best friend (using the new fondness feature between packmates). And you'll see packmates whine at another wolf to invite them to go hunting -- sometimes they may invite you, and sometimes they may not, but either way you can join them if you want.

2) Similarly, when it's time for some wolves to go hunting, yearlings are more likely than older wolves to stay with the pups, since they're not great at hunting yet. They lack an adult's strength and skill. So don't expect to be able to sit back and make all your packmates do all the work. In fact, marking territory is generally the responsibility of the pack leaders. They're the only ones who do raised leg urination. Everybody else can pee and howl, of course, which helps a bit, but territory is the leader's job.

3) So then, you might ask, can we find some dispersal wolves and invite them to join our pack, so we can delegate the work to them? Sorry, no. While that does occasionally happen, it's usually when the pack needs a new breeder (packs are families, not an aggregation of unrelated wolves).

4) The way to expand your pack is by having pups, and playing through the years. A good percentage of pups won't survive to become yearlings. But it only takes a few years to get a multi-generational pack. In Yellowstone, packs tend to have 6-12 wolves. Sometimes they get bigger (though the famous examples like the Druid pack with 37 wolves, was a quirk from wolf reintroduction, before wolf and elk populations stabilized). We'll definitely have a cap on pack size, since it just gets awkward to have so many NPC wolves in your pack (along with performance impacts of so many NPC AIs running at full bore)

Tommi has the yearlings working pretty well, generally, and so we've also been working on gameplay balance. For example, while yearlings do help out with daily work, it's limited. At a carcass, they can eat extra food to regurgitate for the pups, but as much as adults, since they still need most of that food for their own development.

So: good progress, but still lots to do before the Saga is ready to release! We'll share more as we go, so stay tuned!


* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game." Your pups will continue to grow into the fall and beyond, learning to hunt under your supervision, and then becoming yearlings when next year's pups are born. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. The Saga is currently in development but we do not have a release date for it.

___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

Last month we released the Persistent Pack update -- a big new feature and a key part of the Saga. As usual with a big new feature, after initial release there is some additional bug-fixing and clean-up work. In this case, the feature was big enough and the code had gotten messy enough over the final months of work that Raul decided to refactor the code -- restructuring it to make it cleaner, better organized, and easier to maintain.

While he's been doing that, the rest of the team has kept cranking away on other aspects of the Saga...and as part of that, I refreshed my memory about wolf dispersal....and came upon these graphs in the Yellowstone Wolves book by Doug Smith, Dan Stahler, and Dan MacNulty. There's a striking difference in dispersal behaviors by male and female wolves: males are substantially more likely to disperse, while females are more likely to stay with the pack. (This is one of the things that suggests that wolf packs are matrilineal, with female offspring staying in the their natal pack in hopes of becoming a breeder someday.)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So I wondered: Should we incorporate this difference into the game? It's accurate, and that's always a core goal. But it also has real impact on gameplay. If your wolf is male, you'll have a harder time finding a female dispersal and will have to venture into rival pack territory to find a courtable female. Is this the kind of accuracy that makes the game more interesting, or does it make it more annoying or confusing or less fun? After some discussion, we decided to do it. So as part of the Persistent Pack refactor, Raul is adding sex-based odds. Now males are more likely to disperse, and females are more likely to stay with their pack -- but to counterbalance the dispersal shift, more females in each rival pack are more likely to be interested in courtship. We think this adds an interesting consideration when you're creating your wolf and deciding whether it should be male or female. This change will be in the next patch later this month!

In the Saga, when your own pups are coming of age, this will also factor into their own decision about if and when to disperse. We have a lot more planned for this whole "when your pups disperse" stuff...but that's a topic for a future devblog.

One final thing: Hold onto our hats, because I am finally finishing up Chapter 2 of our Wildest Dreams video about the history of WolfQuest. If you haven't watched(or haven't lately watched) the first chapter I encourage you to check it out!

___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

[h2]v1.1.1f - Released 5 January 2024[/h2]

[h3]NEW:[/h3]
* In Game Settings: Audio, new toggle for Eating Noises (actually added in v1.1.1 in December).
* Known Wolves: Keyboard shortcut added, press K key to open this panel directly.
* Improved blocking functionality: On the Account: Friends panel, you can now search for a username and then either send them a friend request, or block them (so you can block someone without getting a friend request from them first). And in multiplayer games, the wolf Info tab has now Block button.
* When set in the main menu, Mate Permadeath and Difficulty settings are remembered when starting games in the future.
* Account panel: New "Sync Now" button to manually sync files with cloud.

[h3]BUGS FIXED:[/h3]
* Multiplayer achievements that require raising pups to summertime fail to unlock when they should. (If you have an Endless Summer save from such a game where you should have earned one of those achievements, load it and it'll be unlocked.)
* Known Wolves panel: After your mate dies, under Departed Wolves they are listed as traveling to another map with another mate. (This fix is not retroactive.)
* Known Wolves panel: Sometimes dispersals switch to another origin pack if you reject them after courtship.
* Known Wolves panel: When toggling Dead Wolves option, the rows of just-disbanded pack will overlap those for an active pack.
* Known Wolves panel: In certain cases, wolf nickname can't be edited.
* Multiplayer: One player can select and edit wolf bio text for another player (but changes aren't saved)
* Multiplayer: Wolf nametag is not displayed for dead wolves waiting to revive.
* Multiplayer: If client player-wolf only has birth name-number, no nickname, it stalls when joining a game.
* Camera FOV (field of view) switches to normal when game is paused, regardless of current FOV.
* Some pronghorn carcasses appear to inflate some while being consumed.
* Rejected trial mate can't accept that you're just not that into them.
* Occasionally the text for the mate bio in Pack Info isn't displayed, because the panel is scrolled out of view.
* Player's previous home hex remains after pack takes over a disbanded pack's home hex, resulting in two homes for the player pack.
* Occasionally the mate gets stuck going in circles, unable to decide between socializing with pups who are near some food, and moving away from that food.
* When away from the den, woofing at mate to go home also tells pups to go into the den.
* Pup keeps "circling" predators even after the predator moves away.
* When loading very old saves, player-wolf with dead mate and living pups is given Dispersal role instead of Courtable Breeder role.
* Issues with Add/Remove Favorite emote button on some display resolutions.
* Courtship stalls out in certain circumstances.
* Mate does not close eyes when howling.
* Sometimes beaver swims through air above water surface.
* Slough Creek: Small ranger cabin has pink floor inside.
* A few den pathfinding issues.
* Terrain issues.